Lorna Simpson

In the late 1980s, Lorna Simpson burst onto the art scene with photographs of unidentified Black figures accompanied by text. These early works interrogated stereotypical images of Black women that existed in popular visual culture and art alike. “The whole premise of the work was to engage with the audience in a way they wouldn't be used to—to put them off balance,” Simpson has said.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960, Simpson studied painting and photography. It was while traveling throughout Italy during her school years that she found the white shift dress that would become an integral part of much of her early work. The garment homogenized the different subjects of her photographs, speaking to a sense of “‘femaleness’ without additional interference from ‘fashion.’”¹ The plain, rough cotton also evoked clothing made and worn by enslaved Black people in the American South—clothing enabled by the cotton plantations that fueled American industry during much of the 19th century.² In these early works, clothing implicitly tied Simpson’s figures to long histories of bondage, surveillance, and oppression faced by Black women in the United States.

Simpson’s first solo exhibition, at Just Above Midtown Gallery in 1986, was soon followed by Projects 23 at MoMA in 1990—the Museum’s first solo exhibition by a Black woman artist. Many of the works featured in the exhibition included details of Black women’s hair, in long plaits, braided crowns, and close crops. For example, 1978-88 consists of four photographs of braided hair against a black surface. Panels with words such as “weave,” “tug,” and “part” sit atop the hair. The work names different ways hair is manipulated, but also, as evidenced by the dates that appear in each photograph, the passage of time. Braids, much like the shift dress, were a fixture in Simpson’s early works, speaking to the tension surrounding Black women’s hair and the important role hair plays in Black culture. Meanwhile, the text Simpson includes in her work is poetic in nature, playing with words to obscure meaning while giving voice back to historically marginalized subjects. Simpson describes her process, saying, “When I take a picture, I have an idea in my head, and I try to make it work. Then I play with language to get what I want.”³ In combining text and image, Simpson’s work brought attention to the systems of categorization and forced visibility that served to oppress Black women. As scholar Saidiya Hartman has noted, Simpson’s work “undermines the viewer’s mastery and disrupts the power of the normalizing gaze” while laying bare the ways in which “memories of suffering are excised in the flesh.”⁴

More recently, Simpson began experimenting in front of the camera as well. Her 2009 series 1957-2009 features a number of archival photographs Simpson found on eBay. Part of an album, the images were arranged in a grid and featured an unknown Black woman in poses recalling pin-ups. Simpson included images of herself playing the subjects surrounding her. Of this experience, Simpson said, “It’s very artificial: I was imitating a woman’s body that is different from mine, a woman’s body that is more agile.”⁵ This investigation led her to further explore depictions of Black women in media and pop culture. In 2016, she began working with the Ebony magazine archives, collaging images from the magazine with photographs she had taken. Across her work, Simpson’s aims remain the same. “I wanted to challenge the idea of subjectivity,” she has said, “how we come to know the subject, and our desire to know the subject through details.”⁶

Note: Opening quote is from Sabine Mirlesse, “Interview with Lorna Simpson.” Aperture, June 25, 2013, accessed March 27, 2023, https://aperture.org/editorial/interview-with-lorna-simpson/.

Antoinette D. Roberts, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, 2023